"Conan, please."
He curled his tail more tightly around his body and
squinched his eyes shut, feigning sleep. Unless she was
offering sautรฉed shrimp, she could forget it.
"Conan, just try one little bite."
Something disgusting was wafted in front of his nose.
Diet cat treats. Ha, as if the words diet and treat could
be used successfully together. He opened one eye, glared
at his mistress and then snapped it shut again.
"Conan, you know what the vet said. You are a tiny bit
overweight."
The vet was a horrible old man who smelled overwhelmingly
of dogs. As if that wasn't bad enough, the good doctor's
body odor and breath gave away an even more treacherous
secret: vegetarian.
The veterinarian was a dog-loving vegetarian, and she was
going to take diet advice from him? The man knew nothing
about the delicacies of dealing with a cat, that had been
obvious.
He heard his mistress walk away, so Conan opened one eye,
placing an orange-colored paw carefully over it so he
could watch her unobserved.
He felt momentarily contrite. Her copper-colored hair,
usually so neatly put back into a bun, was hanging loose
around her face. Her green eyes were wide with worry, and
there was a wrinkle in her normally unblemished forehead.
She was still in her pajamas, something unheard of, even
if it was Sunday morning.
She was obviously distressed, and it made Conan realize
that she really was not as confident or mature as her
primly done hair and straight-lined business suits
suggested. Really he was partly to blame for that visit to
the vet.
Okay, fully to blame. He'd been a free-roaming tabby his
entire sorry life, until he'd found himself in lockup and
had been rescued by her late last fall.
At first he thought he must have used up his ninth life,
even though he'd been counting pretty carefully and
thought he was only on seven. For it had seemed, after
being adopted from the Hunter's Corner Pet Shelter, that
he must have died and gone to heaven!
Miss Bridget Daisy was one of the few people he'd ever met
who really deserved to own a cat. First the name: Conan.
Celtic for "mighty one," she'd explained to him after days
of making lists and debating over just the right name.
Really, what could have been more suiting? The mighty one.
Perfect.
And then the food! She was constantly delighting him:
roasted chicken livers, succulent steak bits and his all-
time favorite, sautรฉed shrimp.
Okay, okay, things were not perfect, even in heaven. When
winter had come she had presented him with a sweater with
his name on it. And a horrid little hat. A guy should have
had way more pride, but he had a weakness for the shrimp.
Miss Daisy might look innocent, but she knew how to play a
guy's weaknesses.
Right now, having been shrimp-deprived for three whole
days, he'd probably wear a tutu for one small morsel of
seafood, any variety.
But the biggest problem with coming home to Miss Daisy
hadn't been the clothes, as humiliating as they were. No,
it had been the fact that she wouldn't let him outside
without a leash. A leash! Of course, in the winter, who
wanted to go outside anyway? Winters were made for
snoozing on the couch. But spring changed everythingโฆ
Which brought him to the visit with Dr. Veggie, the vet.
Conan had been perched in one of his favorite places โ on
the back of her couch โ minding his own business, really.
And then the bird had landed at the feeder, a location
that had seen dismally little traffic over the winter but
was looking more promising now. The front-yard feeder was
shaped like a little house, with shutters and cute signs
all over it that said things like Open for Business and
Birds Welcome. As if birds could read! The expression
birdbrained had not manifested out of thin air.
The bird at the feeder had been a purple finch, something
Conan adored even more than shrimp, if that was possible.
He felt finch had the most delectable flavor โ slightly
wild and faintly smoky with just a touch of bitter
aftertaste, probably from the feathers.
In no time at all, focused with hunter intensity on the
bird, Conan had totally forgotten the window. He had gone
into a crouch, his tail switching, his eyes narrowed on
the prey. He'd waited, knowing the bird would make a
mistake, land on the ground, greedy thing, wanting that
one more tiny seedโฆ.
There it was. His moment. Even as he'd launched himself,
he'd heard her voice in the background.
"Conaaaan, nooooo!"
Too late.
He'd bounced back off that window as if he was a tennis
ball spiked from a racket and lay on the floor dazed,
blood โ important blood, his โ splattering the carpet
around him.
Hence the unfortunate meeting with Dr. Veggie, a white-
haired antiquity with more wrinkles and creases than that
Shar-Pei monstrosity Conan had been forced to share the
waiting room with. Conan had hated the little winter
balaclava Miss Daisy had made for him, but he hated this
more โ his whole head wound with white tape, his ears
poking through two holes in the top, his face completely
surrounded in white as if he were a nun wearing a wimple.
It was horrible. And was there a little sautรฉed shrimp to
help him through his most humiliating moment? No, there
was not.
Because the evil dog lover had pronounced him overweight.
Nothing so scientific as a scale either. Just prodding
with those poochie-smelling fingers that had been God knew
where else that morning!
Miss Daisy could be counted on to be thorough, though. She
had taken him home and put him on her bathroom scale. He
should have known her gasp of dismay did not bode well for
his culinary endeavors. She had actually thought the scale
wasn't working.
"Twenty-six pounds! Conan, I don't think that's possible."
Of course it wasn't possible. He was a little portly, not
fat. It was not at all his fault. His mother had also been
big-boned.
But then Miss Daisy had weighed herself, and it seemed the
scale had been correct after all.
So now he lay curled on the couch, looking like a cat
extra for The Mummy and feeling slightly crazed from food
deprivation. It was a low point in his life, he decided.
He'd had a sniff of the diet food she'd put out and
decided it was worth sulking for a few more days to see if
he could make her come around.
He heard her pick up the phone and perked up slightly.
Maybe she was giving in. Would the pizza joint be open at
eleven o'clock on Sunday morning? He got the pepperoni
nicely gobbed with melted cheese, and she got the inedible
portions โ tomato paste and crust. There was simply no
figuring humans.
"Dr. Thornfield?"
Conan groaned and put his head back down.
"It's Bridget Daisy. I'm sorry to bother you at home. I'm
calling about Conan." There was a long pause. "No, no, his
head seems fine. No, no blood seeping through the
bandages. Of course it doesn't stink!"
The man was gross. Couldn't he word things more delicately
than that?
Her voice went very low, as if she didn't want Conan to
hear, but he was a cat, which meant superior hearing.
Superior everything, come to that.
"I think he's depressed," she whispered into the phone.
Yes! Depressed. Treat immediately with vanilla ice cream,
with just a little shrimpy-poo on top.
Miss Daisy was quiet for a moment and then when she spoke,
her voice had an unfamiliar icy note in it.
"I can't believe you said that! You think I need to occupy
myself? A husband? A child?"
Conan winced and barely staved off a painful flashback
from his former life. Oh, no, he did not care for husbands
or for children, and look how quickly she had taken the
dieting advice!
But he needn't have worried. Her voice was now quite loud,
shrill even.
"What a totally unprofessional thing to say! I thought you
were a man of education and refinement. I can see now I
was wrong. You are โ"
Conan held his breath, waiting, delighted. You give it to
him, Miss Daisy, he thought. He was streetwise enough to
have various phrases at hand that he would have loved to
hear her use on the evil dog-loving, diet-prescribing Dr.
Veggie.
"You are โ" her voice quivered with righteous anger
" โ hopelessly old-fashioned!"
Disappointment washed over Conan. Sheesh. Hopelessly old-
fashioned? What about You are a dog-breathed poop eater?
What about You are a birdbrained worm slurper? Sometimes
Conan wondered if there was any hope at all for Miss Daisy.
She marched into the living room. "Why," she said, her
voice still quivering with indignation, "he's just another
barbarian. Just like all the rest of them in this town."
Ah, yes, Conan had heard quite a lot about the town's
barbarians. That was how Miss Daisy referred to the male
population. Beer-swilling barbarians whose idea of culture
was growing in the bottom of their lunch pails. According
to Miss Daisy, every single man in Hunter's Corner, Ohio,
loved duck hunting and fishing and playing pool. The name
of the place should have given her a clue. Redneck heaven.
Duck hunting usually involved dogs of some sort, so Conan
was against that, but he thought she might have been too
quick to write off fishing. A nice freshly caught trout,
braised in butter and garlic, was nothing to turn up one's
nose at!
He had no opinion on pool, but if it was one of the
reasons Miss Daisy had ended up at the animal shelter
seeking companionship, he could hardly condemn it.
She never really said she was lonely, but Conan could
tell. She'd told him most of her life story his first
night in residence, curled up together on the sofa, her
popping little soft-centered nondiet cat treats into his
mouth as she talked.
She was from Boston and had a master's degree in library
science. When she'd been offered the position of librarian
here, in this northeastern corner of Ohio, right after
completing university, she had jumped at the opportunity.
"Of course," she had told Conan that night, "I always
thought I'd move on. To a bigger place, a city bursting
with art and live theater and music. To a place with
corner cafรฉs that serve lattes, quaint little bookstores
filled with old treasures and outdoor flower markets."
She sighed heavily and pulled him more tightly into her
bosom. "But, Conan, I have come to love my little brick
library across from the town square. I've done so much
with it in the two years I've been here! We have story
time and a poetry club. The chess club meets there once a
week. Why, the collection is marvelous for a small-town
library! How could I leave it?"
Still, he could see her dilemma. How was a woman like her
ever going to find companionship in a town where men drove
pickup trucks with wheels nearly the size of her house?
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